Akiko Takesue
Bishop White Committee Associate Curator of Japanese Art & Culture
Bio
Ph.D. Art History and Visual Culture, York University, 2016
M.A. Art History, University of Toronto, 2009
Master of Art Administration, University of New South Wales, 2000
Akiko Takesue joined the ROM in 2021 as the Bishop White Committee Associate Curator of Japanese Art & Culture, an endowed position. She is responsible for researching and developing the ROM’s collection of Japanese art and culture, numbering approximately 10,000 objects and ranging in date from the archaeology of the Jōmon period (10,000–300 BCE) to the present day. While the collection covers most of the significant areas of Japanese art, its strengths lie in woodblock prints of the 18th and 19th centuries, arms and armour, ceramics, utensils for tea practice (the Yamagami Collection), and lacquerware. She will also build a vision for the new Prince Takamado Gallery of Japan, whose plan is being underway.
Dr. Takesue is not a stranger at the ROM. After serving as a visiting scholar for the Japanese collection from 2001, she helped establish the original Prince Takamado Gallery of Japan from 2003 to 2005 as Academic Advisor. She continued working on different curatorial projects at the ROM until 2014. Dr. Takesue thinks that her time at the ROM indeed trained her as a museum curator.
In addition to the ROM, she had broad curatorial experience in museums in Australia, Canada, and the U.S., from researching the Japanese collections to curating permanent galleries and special exhibitions of Japanese art. Most recently, she was a co-curator for the exhibition Obsession: Sir William Van Horne’s Japanese Ceramics, held at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) from 2018 to 2020. At the MMFA, she also worked on the renewal of the permanent gallery as a post-doc fellow. In 2017-2019, she was part of the U.S./Japan organizing team for the exhibition The Life of Animals in Japanese Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Dr. Takesue received her Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Culture from York University, Toronto, in 2016, researching the continuous object history of Japanese ceramics collected by Sir William Van Horne (1843-1915), part of which is housed at the ROM. Her primary research interest lies in the reception and representation of Japanese art outside Japan from the nineteenth century to today, and the way the historical discrepancies in the ideas of “Japanese art” among different places have been carried on even until today. She is also interested in the processes where the object’s meaning and value shift as they move through space and time and the agencies that are involved in the processes. Dr. Takesue looks forward to expanding her research areas into modern eras, in particular, the development of print media in Japan and their reception outside Japan.